Make sure before playing games only is setting up your monitors contrast & brightness levels a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have setup your monitor improper. How do we know this ? Because we receive a couple of email every now and then telling that a reader can't distinguish the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

DhryStone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test, which basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

The DhryStone test pure CPU test that runs completely in the CPU itself. A perfect test to see the general efficiency per core

Today we focus on the Phenom X4 9850 performance across four recent AMD based mainboards.

The Intel results in here are just a courtesy really as they do have the faster processors. To satisfy my own curiosity I wanted to test a dual-core processor and then compare it to the Quad core Phenom, with one distinct advantage for C2D in mind, a faster clocked version of ~3 GHz. As you will see throughout the review, this dual core based processor can keep up really well, thanks to the much higher clock frequency.

But quite honestly, throughout the review what you need to focus on is the difference between the Phenom X4 9850 GF8200, the Phenom X4 9850 on the 780G chipset and then the Phenom X4 9850 on the new 790GX chipset.

Colored in Deep Green, throughout the review you'll notice the results of the ECS mainboard we are testing today

3DMark06 CPU test

Here we run a 3DMark06 CPU test on a couple of processors. If I remember correctly 3DMark06 only makes use of two threads per CPU. Again focus on the difference between the Phenom X4 9850 on the AMD 790GX platform and then the same processor on the GF8200A and 780G chipset. Really, there's no difference.